


the house that built me

by spacenarwhal



Series: we make this road by walking [3]
Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Families of Choice, M/M, Moving On, Post-Apocalypse, Rebuilding, Unconventional Families, internalized ableism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-28
Updated: 2016-08-28
Packaged: 2018-08-11 14:26:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7896136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacenarwhal/pseuds/spacenarwhal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the wake of destruction, they must do what they’ve always done. </p><p>They rebuild. They move forward. Charles hopes that this time they won’t have to do it alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the house that built me

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place after the first part in this series but many many years before the second. I hope to one day write the story of how Erik comes back to stay for good.

i.

Agreeing on the blue prints is as disastrous as any group affair can be. 

They’re pieced together between Charles, Raven, Hank, and Erik, drawn up from any number of memories that prove to be more subjective than does any of them any good. Matters are further complicated by the numerous wishes of the parties involved, with necessity rearing its head throughout the process. 

Charles draws the line when he sees Hank and Raven hunched over a sheet of graph paper sketching was looks suspiciously like a floorplan. He understands the need for secrecy, perhaps now more than ever before, but as brilliant as he knows Hank to be, he’s a scientist not an architect. He ignores Erik’s barely veiled disapproval and hires a contractor to draw up the final plans. He makes sure to communicate the specifications they were able to agree on for the foundations, including the series of tunnels, secret corridors and escape routes leading out into the forest that he half-remembers from another life that’ll never be lived. In addition to these he requests modifications to the existing subterranean levels that’ll house Cerebro again once the house is rebuilt, making room for the training room Hank, Raven, and Erik have been bickering over in frantic whispers every moment they believed Charles is occupied elsewhere. 

When the job is done Charles pays the contractor handsomely before erasing all memories of their work and sending them on their way. 

“Why Charles, I didn’t know you had it in you.” Erik says drily, approval warming his tone. Raven rolls her eyes. Charles doesn’t say anything at all. But he made a promise to himself when they first arrived back and he saw the full extent of the damage Apocalypse and then the government had left in their wake. Charles does not believe in making the same mistake twice. 

He understands the difference between hope and foolishness. 

ii. 

Though the school year came to an abrupt pause and many students have returned to their homes until matters are settled, there remain many students without homes to return to. These they had found taking shelter in what had once served as groundkeeper quarters, nearly a dozen students of various ages, working together to keep each other alive as the world around them went mad. 

As the house is little more than a cavernous ruin they do their best to make the groundkeeper’s quarters a viable home for them all. Hank had used it as a laboratory years ago, when he’d first decided to stay on and help Charles start his dream school, before the war had taken their students and regrets had crippled Charles’ mind. The cellar that Hank had converted into his lab space was left mostly abandoned once they’d shut their doors the first time, when he’d relocated to the main house to keep a closer eye on Charles, who had become too isolated, too maudlin, too reclusive for any one’s good. Now it’s something like a second attic, a cluttered room of castaways collecting dust and cobwebs. This is the space that Raven, Hank, and Erik clear out with the help of Jean and Scott, Kurt appearing and disappearing with the larger pieces in order to make room for the dozens of bunk beds meant for those of them who remain. 

The building isn’t the most accessible, built as it was without the needs of a wheelchair in the mind. Charles allows himself a single brooding moment to feel like a heel, watching Erik and Hank modify the space to the best of their abilities for him. Necessity requires him to live somewhat apart from the rest of them, restricting him to the first floor unless Hank manages to create some kind of rudimentary elevator or he can swallow his pride enough to ask Erik to assist him navigate the stairs in his chair. There’s a small comfort to knowing the adjustments will ease things for Peter as well, who even with his natural good cheer and sense of humor, is not adjusting well to being forced to take things slow. 

All their planning for the new school is not enough to distract him from the promises he’s made in the past. He had promised his students an education as well as a home, both of which he fully intends to deliver. 

-

“You’re still reading this book?” Raven asks incredulously, opening a box of books delivered just that morning. She holds up a copy of The Once and Future King as though it might bite her. Raven has always been much more amendable to Mary Shelley. “It’s a literary classic.” Charles replies primly, taking the book from Raven’s blue hands. One of a hundred cheap mass market paperbacks, it’s binding flimsy beneath his fingertips. So many things lost to the fire, irreplaceable and precious, but there’s a pang he can’t shake off whenever he thinks of the library, his childhood’s sanctuary that remained a safe haven in his adulthood. 

“It’s a bore and you’re cruel for forcing these kids to read it.” Raven says but there’s no malice in her voice. It’s more of a tease, flippant and pointless. Her grin, when he looks up at her is remarkable to behold. It is the grin that sought him out in mind-numbingly boring dinner parties and chased him down empty hallways and dismayed of his horrible pick-up lines in pubs. 

“Let me worry about the literature,” Charles says, returning her smile as carefully as he can. “And we know Hank will continue to cover what science and maths he can. What would you say to assisting with a class of your own until we have something more formal established? Keep the children from getting so bored they mutiny.”

Raven’s golden eyes narrow, her grin takes on a suspicious edge but it doesn’t disappear. “Like what? PE?”

Charles laughs. “You read my mind.” (Perhaps not all things, he thinks gratefully, stay lost forever).

iii.

Even with the blue prints finalized Charles is somewhat reluctant to approach the next part of the equation. 

“Are you sure you’re qualified to do this?” Charles asks, skeptical and making absolutely no attempt at hiding it. Erik is skilled at a great many things: strategy, combat, being an ass. But to Charles’ (admittedly interrupted and somewhat incomplete) knowledge, Erik doesn’t have much experience in terms of construction. 

“Are you actually qualified to mentor young minds?” Erik shoots back, impressing upon Charles a rather compelling argument in the form of a memory: Charles, twenty years younger, drunk, flushed pink and impossibly wide-eyed as he fed Erik some line about his genetic makeup. 

Charles winces. He’d almost managed to forget about that night. Well. No. He hadn’t. But he was positive he was making progress. 

“Fair enough.” 

-

In a wholly expected turn of events: it is a disaster. 

-

“We can’t live in a wholly metal house!” Charles snaps. Erik scowls and all the handles on the kitchen cabinets tremble. Charles rolls his eyes. 

At the counter, Scott tenses, fingers flicking defensively to his glasses. (Scott hadn’t returned to his foster family either, helping instead with clearing the grounds of rubble. Charles knows what he’s searching for in the debris, just like he knows it’s not there for the finding.) Charles stays him with a miniscule shake of his head. He misses the sway of his hair over his ears and feels petty for it. 

It’s hard sometimes to remember that Scott is not his brother, that he has no memory of Erik from before, before he was the infamous Magneto, when he was just a mission-driven man in ill-fitting sweats, leading runs around the grounds and pushing Cassidy out a window to teach him to fly. Alex had never been afraid of Erik before Cuba, and he’d only ever spoken of him in anger afterward, on the few occasions he spoke about what had happened on that beach at all. 

“It’s quite alright Scott.” Charles says. One thing is for sure, the years have not made Erik any less impossible.

Erik draws a deep breath, and the rattling stops. His fingers clench into fists and then relax on an exhale. He turns on his heel and walks out of the room without another word. Charles raises an eyebrow at the empty doorway before him and mentally corrects himself. Alright, _slightly_ less impossible.

-

“Won’t this compromise the stability of the wood?” Hank asks, watching as Erik threads shining, liquid metal along the length of a wooden beam.

Erik shoots Hank a swift glare but doesn’t say anything. 

“I think you might want to start looking into real estate.” Raven mutters under her breath at Charles’ shoulder as Erik attempts to levitate the beam up off the grass. He manages a few promising feet before the metal separates from the surface of the beam, sends it crashing down to the ground with a slam. Erik curses, expansively, in what sounds like German. 

Charles glances around the property to check for little ears. He makes sure to perform the mental equivalent of a knock before he silently replies to Raven’s comment. _You might not be wrong._

-

He finds Erik sitting out on the grounds. In all their planning and preparations and multiple attempts at starting construction they have not been alone together once. Apocalypse never left them alone together, perhaps privy to the unbreakable tethers that bind Charles to Erik and Erik to him, the bonds that have manages to withstand distance and heartbreak and loss, that connect them each to the other across lifetimes and wars. Perhaps it’s that very bond that has kept them apart now, afraid to reach out and find the other one waiting. Afraid of what it might mean. 

Erik doesn’t flee when Charles approaches him, which is commendable. He also doesn’t make any attempt to speak either. 

Erik’s brow is furrowed and Charles take a moment to get his bearings of the situation. “Something has been weighing on your mind—” Charles starts, biting his tongue in his effort to get the words out the moment he catches the flicker of suspicion cross Erik’s face, “And before you say anything, I have not been snooping. Your apprehension has been event for some time now Erik. Or have you forgotten, I’ve seen you lift entire stadiums. In fact, you dropped a bit of one on me.” This grin feels disingenuous on his face but it comes to life before he can stop himself, born of some oddly shaped desire to put Erik at ease. “Yet now, you seem almost reluctant to use your powers to their full ability. You can’t blame me for being concerned.” Erik’s jaw tightens with a tick. “If you regret offering your help, I won’t hold you to anything.” Not that Erik has ever been one for doing anything against his will. 

Erik exhales slowly, casts his eyes down at his hands. “I brought him here. He led him to your door and as a result—” _Alex is dead. Just like all the others._ Charles almost flinches at the brush of Erik’s mind against his own. “I destroyed your home as I destroyed mine.” His voice is quiet, even, but there’s an underlying steel that belies the possibility of softness. Erik’s gaze falls to his hands. “I allowed myself to become the weapon of another’s will after I swore to myself I would never let that happen again. And all the power he woke in me,” Erik’s hands furl into fists. “It doesn’t feel like a part of me at all.” 

Charles isn’t sure what he expected but it wasn’t that. 

He wraps his own hands around the arms of the wheelchair, tries to keep his face devoid of the turmoil that churns inside him. 

Moira had disapproved of his decision to invite Erik back to Westminster. She made that much clear before she bid Charles farewell. Hank tracks his every movement with distrust. 

He’s far beyond the point where he might even consider pretending Erik hasn’t done the things he’s done. More than that he doesn’t want to. It would be a disservice to them both, to the choices they’ve made and the lives they’ve led as a result. But he’s also spent the last weeks thinking about what he saw when he looked inside Erik’s mind for the first time in ten years, the pain of loss and the blinding grief and the total acceptance that he was what Shaw had told him he was all those years ago. A monster. A weapon. 

“But it is a part of you.” Charles says slowly, licking his lips. He casts his eyes away from Erik’s face, glances out at the wooded grounds around them. “Your abilities have always been there, as has their potential. What he did Erik, that was nothing more than what Shaw did. He took advantage of your grief—I am not saying this to abolish your guilt, but I also don’t think it’s insignificant that you feel guilty. You’ve changed Erik. You know that. And it has nothing to do with what you can do now with your abilities, though I do believe it can have something to do with what you choose to do next.”

“Is this you asking me to stay?” Erik’s voice is faint, sounds far away even if he’s only at Charles’ side.

“No, no, this is me asking you to believe me when I say that I still believe what I said that day. There is so much more to you than you know.” No one had been more surprised than Charles when he’d realized how much that was true.

They sit in near silence for some time afterward. Neither of them speaks again, but neither of them leaves either. 

iv. 

“Professor?” Jean approaches him one day after his earlier attempts to give a lecture to his remaining pupils devolves into watching them run wild across the open grounds. He’ll never admit it but perhaps Raven had a point when she questioned his choice of book. 

Charles looks at Jean, her red hair bound in a tight plait that hangs over her shoulder. Jean had the option of returning home to her parents upon their return from Egypt but she chose to remain behind.

“Yes,” Charles answers, blinking in order to clear himself out of the slight daze he’d allowed himself to fall into. “Jean, how are you this fine day?” She carries herself differently since Cairo, seems less concerned with the space she occupies. Even her head seems lighter on her shoulders. There’s a degree of peace to her mind now that Charles had feared she would need years to find, her earlier fear quieted even if it hasn’t completely disappeared. There’s a new maturity in her eyes, the same look he recognizes in Raven, in Hank, that he had seen in Sean and Alex, in all of those who followed them out to war. He had sworn to himself he would never do it again, but sitting there on debris-strewn grounds, he knows that it isn’t enough to hope the world will never have need of them again. His children. 

“I’m alright Professor.” She answers, following his gaze out over the green lawn. Ororo—the youngest of Apocalypse’s recruits, an orphan girl younger than Scott—has joined the raucous game of hide-and-seek with some of the other students. All of whom seem content to cheat flagrantly using their abilities. Kurt for example keeps disappearing into trees or using his tail to tag opponents. From his seat on the lawn, Peter shouts out people’s locations, crutches thrown haphazardly down on the grass besides him. Jean and Charles watch them run a moment before Jean turns towards him once more. 

“Professor, I’d like to help.” She says, steady and sure. “I mean—I think I can help. With the house.”

-

“Did you question her credentials as well?” Erik asks wryly when Charles approaches him with Jean’s idea over a late lunch. Erik, who spent the day with Hank checking the parameters of the grounds as part of their quest to improve upon the existing security measures, looks at him with a look that clearly questions if Charles hasn’t lost his mind. 

“You’ve seen what she can do. Her powers are—well to be frank she’s far more powerful than either of us. And it could be a viable solution to the problem we’ve been encountering with all non-metal building materials. Don’t you think it might be worth the try?”

He looks at Erik pointedly over the rim of his tea cup. 

Erik sighs. 

-

Watching them work together is breathtaking. They sit together for hours, pouring over the blueprints, Jean closing her eyes as she envisions spaces, fingers twitching in the air as she works through the steps in her mind. Erik presses his hands to the earth, touches all the materials they have and weighs them in his palms like he needs to be familiar with every piece that’ll eventually go into the building.

It doesn’t take immediately. Their first attempts at a foundation fall apart before they’ve even really gotten underway and both of them stomp off to brood in the forests. Kurt and Scott go to fetch Jean out of hiding. Surprisingly, amazingly, it’s Raven, with Peter hobbling along behind her, who get Erik to come out hiding. 

They try again. And again. And again. They build up the house in pieces, their hands steady and their eyes narrowed with fierce focus as the rest of them look on in awe. 

“She’s remarkable.” Erik says after the last brick’s been laid and the last nail hammered into place, his voice soft with wonder. “She’s going to do incredible things Charles.”

“She already has.” Charles agrees, looking over at Jean where she’s talking quickly with the other students, once again every bit of the teenage girl she is. Peter says something that makes her laugh, her head tipped towards the blue sky overhead. 

v. 

Erik doesn’t leave. 

Peter’s cast is switched out for a walking boot. Raven stops flinching when a student openly admires her. Scott’s jaw relaxes a fraction more, though his grief remains a dull pulsing energy, reverberating just beneath the surface of his skin. The world carries on outside the bubble they’ve made for themselves in upstate New York but Erik remains there with them. The house is built and the grounds cleared of the debris, the students back in their rooms but Erik does not leave. That does not mean Charles stops waiting for him to do so. 

“Mystique says you’re starting a team.” Erik says one day while they’re in the basement, examining the new room Charles had added. Erik levitates at the center of the room making minor adjustments to the metal panels lining the walls. They’re Hank’s creations, something he’s had in the works since their battle with the Sentinels ten years back. Raven and Hank have begun to jokingly refer to this room as the ‘Danger Room’ and Charles can’t be bothered by it, not when he sees them grinning at one another as though they were twenty-years younger, without the weight of two decades of hurt weighing on their shoulders. 

Charles furrows his brow. “Something of the sort. Assuming she’s staying of course. I don’t really have much to contribute in that arena after all.” He says it with a small smile. Erik had taught him how to throw a punch, long before but even then, Charles has always been dismal in a fight. 

Erik slowly descends back towards him, lands on light feet. It’s so much odder a sight now that he’s without the cape or the helmet, dressed in everyday jeans and a threadbare flannel, face roughened with stubble and tired but less troubled than he has been. “She’ll stay. If you ask her.” 

Charles scowls. “Oh really. Ask her? I hadn’t tired that before.”

Erik grins, a small rueful twist of his mouth. “So it’s true what they say about old age bringing out the worst in people.” 

“I’ve learned from my elders.” Charles says pointedly and actually earns one of Erik’s rare laughs.

He wonders if Erik would stay if Charles only asks. He does not know where the question would fall on the spectrum of foolishness and hope. 

-

The new kitchen is larger than the last. They’ll have to hire a kitchen staff once all the students have returned but for now they’re alternating between Erik, Ororo, and Hank. Raven tried but nearly twenty years of living on her own have not translated to palatable culinary skills. Charles fries the occasional egg in the morning and remains the most capable at brewing a strong up of tea, a skill no one but Kurt seems to appreciate. 

The aisles have been made wider, wide enough that Charles can easily maneuver around the room in his chair, a fact he’s infinitely glad for as it allows him to approach Raven without colliding into any of the counters. Raven stands in front of the refrigerator, blue and bathed in stark light as she raids the shelves for something to eat. 

“Do we have any more of that stew stuff Ororo made for dinner?” Raven asks, rummaging behind the milk. 

Charles stares at her and perhaps it’s too little too late but he doesn’t see the small girl he found in the kitchen when he was only a child himself. She’s grown so much, but she’s still Raven. Even when she was a decade long stranger, she has always been Raven to him. No matter how long they went apart, he was always here, waiting for her to reach out to him. And she finally did. Now he has to reach back. 

“Will you stay?” He says, heart in his throat, “Here? At the school. Will you stay and help the students? Teach them to be proud of who they are and what they can do.”

She goes still, turns towards him slowly. “Charles,” her golden eyes blink at him, “We’re too old to play house. I can’t be—”

“I’m not asking you to.” Charles rushes to assure her. “I’m asking you to stay. As a partner if you no longer think of me as your brother. But please, Mystique, stay. Help me teach these students that they deserve to be proud of the things that make them different. Help me teach them how to defend themselves and others if the need ever arises.” And it will, no matter how much Charles wishes it weren’t true, it will. 

Something washes across Raven’s face, something torrential and devastating that breaks Charles heart before she carefully buries it beneath a composed mask. But her eyes are still bright when she kneels, her movements fluid and graceful, her hands cool from the refrigerator when she takes up one of his own. “You’ll always be my brother, Charles.”

Charles blinks, eyes stinging. He clasps Raven’s cold hands in his. “I’m sorry, if I ever made you doubt what you meant to me, if you ever questioned you were my family—”

Raven shakes her head. “I’m sorry too—”

_Stay_. Charles thinks because he can’t make his mouth work, throat squeezing around the words. _Please._

“I’ll think about it—really Charles, I will. But even if—It won’t be like before. I promise.”

It isn’t the answer he’d hoped for, but it is a start. 

-

“She was—she would have liked it here. Your school. She always wanted to meet more people like us.” Erik says, eyes fixed on the board between them. There’s a distant part of Charles mind that knows this but he doesn’t say anything, remains silent and waits for Erik to continue. “There wasn’t an animal in the world that didn’t love her. When she was born, I’d find humming birds and blue jays and robins in her nursery, you wouldn’t believe it Charles, it was like something out of a storybook.” Erik’s voice trembles. “Magda—she—she was never afraid of her. Of what she could do. But she worried that she didn’t play with more children—but it wasn’t safe. Nina’s powers, she was too much like me you know, her abilities were always tied to her emotions. She could get upset and worms would rise up out of the dirt or laugh and set off an orchestra in the forest. She scared the men who came for me—because she was scared, because she didn’t want them to take her father—”

Erik doesn’t flinch when Charles pulls his chair up alongside his own seat, doesn’t pull his hand out of Charles’ hand when he reaches for him. If anything, Erik crushes their fingers together. 

“She loved you very much. They both did.” Charles says, voice thick. 

“I couldn’t keep them safe.” Erik says, anguish written clear across his face. “I couldn’t keep any of them—”

Charles squeezes Erik’s trembling hand in his. He doesn’t know what to say, knows there’s no condolences he can offer that’ll lessen Erik’s loss, his sense of failure. 

_I should have died with them._

_No_ , Charles thinks fiercely, _now you must live for them. With all the rest of us who remain to remember them._

In the wake of destruction, they must do what they’ve always done. They rebuild. They move forward. Charles hopes that this time they won’t have to do it alone. 

**Author's Note:**

> This story started solely because I wanted to write about how Erik couldn't build a house on his own. Lol. 
> 
> Title from the song by Miranda Lambert.


End file.
